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Take a walk down your local grocery store's frozen food section. I'm sure you'll find some sort of frozen Asian dish there. Most of the time, those dishes will be made by American companies. You'll find mostly Chinese and/or Japanese dishes such as orange chicken and teriyaki chicken/beef. You probably won't find anything like frozen adobo or pad see ew that you can make in a skillet. I thought that there would not be much of a choice in this aisle, but I was surprised. Every company had at least one frozen Asian offering. I picked out the foods that were definitely not Asian, but were Asian-influenced. Here's what I found... (I did not subject my Asian American friends to this sort of thing).
Stouffer's Lean Cuisine - Chicken Chow Mein $2.59 At $2.59, the price is reasonable...but it's kid-sized! The picture on the box is unsettling. Every time I've had chow mein, noodles were in it. Why does this one have rice? I was not looking forward to eating this because of the weird airplane food smell. Well...the celery did taste like celery. The chicken was EXTREMELY soft, almost mushy. The sauce puzzled me because I had no clue as to what kind of sauce it was. The box says it's a "soy-seasoned" sauce [shrug]. The vegetables "squeaked" when you bit into them. I give it a C+. The vegetables and chicken had weird textures and it was bland overall.
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Skillet Sensations - Chicken Oriental $5.65 "White meat chicken, pasta, and vegetables in an Oriental-style sauce..." This one has frozen noodles, beans, onions, carrots, and chicken. The sauce in this one came in the form of little frozen disks...almost like sauce coins. It was kind of smelly. My parents even complained about it. The effort that it takes to prepare this is minimal and I'm not looking forward to this one. I can't really tell what it smells like other than "salty." It kind of reminds me of chop suey. The noodles were short and wide. They seemed out of place. The noodles belong in an Italian dish instead. The vegetable texture was either soft of crunchy. These veggies squeaked when you bit into them. The chicken was bland and it almost sprang back when you bit into it. The sauce was bland as well. C+. This is totally chop suey and it's BLAND.
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Stouffer's Lean Cuisine - Thai Style Chicken $3.45 "Grilled chicken tenderloins in a mild roasted red pepper sauce w/ a rice medley..." It sounds uhh... festive? When I pre-inspected the frozen form, I already knew that the rice would be slimy. The chicken looked.. OK? Overall, it didn't look so great. I thought these frozen dinners were supposed to be convenient. They take approximately ten minutes to prepare. It takes less time to pick up the phone and order a pizza... There is almost no food in this thing! It smelled gross while it was cooking. I can't really describe the smell. It was just...unpleasant. The rice did turn up to be slimy, it didn't taste good, and the insides were hard! The chicken was really dry and tasteless. The sauce doesn't help out any. I taste the "Thai-style" anywhere although there is a faint coconut smell... D. Airplane food that has gross rice and the "chicken taste like wood"
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Uncle Ben's Rice Bowls - Teriyaki Chicken $3.99 I was really unsure about this... Uncle Ben has combined teriyaki sauce, assorted vegetables, and some chicken to make this dish. The picture on the packaging made it look OK. The bowl is really small and for $3.99, it's a bad value. When I peeled off the protective plastic layer, a strong red pepper smell rushed out. The smell reminded me of airplane food. My dad asked me if there was anything burning when I put this in the microwave. This teriyaki bowl didn't even taste like teriyaki. It was really watery too...It almost had a porridge-like consistency. The vegetables didn't taste very good either. This thing gets a C-. It's not great, but not horrible either. I would eat it if there was nothing else in my freezer, but for four bucks? It's not worth it.
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Safeway Select Gourmet Club - Orange Chicken $5.99 "A taste of the orient in minutes..." - boxtop (HAHA) This is hardly a bargain at six bucks! This frozen version of orange chicken is funny because the sauce is frozen on the bottom (at first I thought there was none). When you flip it upside down, the sauce looks really nasty! It was like a big cube. My first thought was "sick...orange chicken nuggets." It tasted like the orange chicken from cheap Chinese food places (like the ones you find in malls). At first it would be sweet, then gingery, then spicy. I would rather go out and buy orange chicken cheaper at a real Chinese restaurant. C+. Six bucks!? I can get much better for six bucks. I guess this would be good for a last resort during an orange chicken craving...
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Safeway Select Gourmet Club - White Rice $1.69 The package is in the shape of those Chinese food take-out boxes. I can't figure out if this is clever or not. When I saw them, I laughed. I hope nobody heard me in the supermarket. You can find these at Vons/Safeway. There were other varieties of rice such as shrimp fried rice. I wanted to stay safe with the white rice. This rice takes ten minutes to prepare! If you were patient, you could have fresh rice... This rice was totally dry and bland. It was tasteless. I know other kinds of rice have some sort of flavor to them but not this one. It wasn't sticky either. I'm used to having rice that kind of clumps together. This rice just falls apart. It also squeaks when you bite into it. I give it a B. It's dry and bland, but it's white rice. How hard is it to mess up white rice?
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